Changing Faces – Would Facial Skins work?

Have the new druid skins in Warcraft opened up a greater possibility for more character customisation, or are Blizzard going to leave it as just livening up a typical and repetitive form and the chance to be a little more unique?

Once upon a time I played Sims. The orginal. After accidently discovering that if you brought a particular piece of artwork and sold it 24 hours later it was worth about 5 times as much – none of my Sims ever worked another day in their life.

One thing the Sims had was the ability to take a picture of two of my favourite TV Actors that had never ever got together in the script -( even though we knew they belonged with each other) and using the Tool that was available on the Game – I stuck their faces on a Sim each , and then set them up in their own little house. ( With art investment as their income source)

There has already been some discussion ages ago about the possibility of tattoos, and colour customisation of gear in Warcraft so you could colour coordinate, but what about the ability to Morph a real photo with your characters facial skin?

It has its Limitations such as there would need to be a review of the uploads to ensure that they don’t breech copywrite ( such as celebrity images – Imagine how many Angelina Jolie Blood Elves would be running round. They would need to be checked for adult content, and even maybe a check to make sure that the image quaility was sufficient, and the features morph well enough with the character skin, and thats alot of work – but what could be unique and customisable then using real faces.

Your Toon could be wearing your face as you Swing your sword, or destroy your enemies with a blast, a flay.

It has lots of scope for abuse. An image of anyone would work, so perhaps your hearts desire rejected you in real life, their face could live on as one of your Toons, and that gets a little creepy.

There would also be some races where the Morphing wouldn’t work as well. Eg Undead , and Tauren.

I tried mucking around with Morph Thing to see what sort of Morphed image I would get – yes thats me sorta.. Its a Posed pic I had on my PC that was the closest headshot that matched & that I liked enough to stick on a public blog. ( and its 18 months old… ) .

So In conclusion: I think the result would be a little creepy – on the upside its still Nightelfish enough to be considered a render of a fantasy type Skin, but its not recongnisable as a person – and pixel quality is crap. I think If the Morphing software had a more gradual Morph to play with then I would have gotten better results, but do you think these are still recognisable in any way?